The Dark Knight Trilogy: Modern Mythology of the Hero's Role in Civil Society

The debut of The Dark Knight Rises marks the third installment of Christopher Nolan's batman trilogy
and is the final conclusion to his modern mythology that explores justice, crime and human nature within the confines of civil society. The success of the first two films had raised such a high bar that much speculation and debate surrounded whether or not a third film could live up to and surpass its predecessors. After seeing the film, I can say that as the third part of a trilogy Nolan was able to successfully create a satisfying book end to the thematic structures of the first two films while escalating entertainment value and cinematic scale to a new level of believable comic book mythos come to life. Unfortunately however, I felt that as an individual self-contained story, the film fell short of the standard of perfection that Nolan had set for himself; while it was an incredible achievement, the moral assertions seem muddier and the hidden twist at the end only retroactively dissolved the arcs of its villains while simultaneously making batman's final triumph a bit anti-climactic. Despite, The Dark Knight Rises falling just barely short of perfection, I truly loved the film and consider the trilogy to be a lasting contribution to film canon as a meditation on the modern mythological role of the hero as protector of justice in modern civil society.


The Beginning of Fear and Justice

Batman begins starts by establishing the flaw with Gotham as the mythological embodiment of society. The Wayne family is a modern day wealthy aristocracy who live as champions of good providing philanthropic contributions and using their power for beneficial solutions such as the public transportation train system that they built. They are accidentally murdered in a robbery. Here the world is established to be imperfect. Some people are rich and others are poor. This is an almost Lockean assertion that scarcity leads to the necessity of civil government. The criminal avoids just punishment by acting as a witness to the crime boss Falcony. After the trial the Wayne murderer is himself murdered by a pawn to protect Falcony from his testimonies. Civil society appears to be further flawed because the limits of government include the ability to defeat corruption. Bruce Wayne confesses to his long time friend and assistant to the DA Rachel Dawes that he wanted to claim justice himself by murdering the man who killed his parents. She responds by saying that, "Justice is about harmony, Revenge is about making yourself feel better", and Wayne says, "Your system is broken". Here Nolan has laid out the beginnings of Batman's philosophy that civil justice has failed to uphold its obligation to society and it needs something more. Rachel Dawes quickly responds with the counter argument, "If you believe in Justice, look beyond yourself". Social order in civil society is greater than the needs for individual justice. The bulk of Batman begins then follows Bruce Wayne's journey as he learns to become more than just a man and becomes a servant of the civil society. 

A strong theme of Batman begins and later the Dark Knight Rises is fear. Bruce Wayne is established to have a Fear of bats. In a conversation with  Ra's Al Ghul who introduced himself as Henri Ducard, when asked what he wants Bruce Wayne Says, "I seek to fight injustice. To turn fear into a means to fight the fearful." Ducard later syas, "I can offer you a path. The path of a man who shares his hatred of evil and wishes to serve true justice, if you devote yourself to an ideal, you become something else entirely." Essentially Batman as a character is a wealthy aristocratic prince who has chosen to fulfill a self imposed civil duty to dedicate his life to fight injustice. Yet rather than fight as a public figure contributing wealth and leadership as his parents did, he fights injustice literally and becomes a symbol of fear. 

Only, the injustice that Ra's Al Ghul and Batman mean to fight are two different things. Ra's Al Ghul wants to destroy the decadence and corruption of Gotham while Batman seeks to fight crime. Ra's Al Ghul's plan is to destroy gotham literally with fear in the form of a weaponized fear-inducing chemical. Batman stops him. As ideologies this establishes a difference between the pursuit of justice as an equalizing of economic scarcity with the pursuit of justice as preserving societal harmony through the prevention of crime. Since crime is the breaking of societies set of formal rules that we call laws, this leaves a philosophical contradiction. Vigilanteism violates the law, so how is this an exemplar morality? 


The Dark Knight as higher Morality. 

The second installment titled 'The Dark Knight', pits Batman against a "new class of criminal" called the Joker. The Joker is seperate from other criminals because he isn't after money. He just wants to watch the world burn. His destruction of society seems to involve an exploitation of human nature.  
From the opening scene where he executes a mob bank robbery and talks his accomplices into killing each other to the manipulation and corruption of Harvey Dent, it is evident that The Joker's super power is the ability to exploit the predictability of human nature. He plans and schemes and seems to manipulate everyone in the film by pushing their buttons. 

The Joker Explains to Harvey Dent "Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just, do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon’s got plans. You know, they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how, pathetic, their attempts to control things really are..." In essence the Joker is explaining his belief in the ultimate futility of control and civil societies failure to provide stability. 

"You know what, you know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger, will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all, part of the plan. But when I say that one, little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!... " The Joker explains how he derives his power. It lies in the predictability of humanities natural reaction to fear. 

"Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh and you know the thing about chaos, it’s fearr."
There we have it. The Joker exists as a moral opposition to Batman because he represents anarchy and chaos and as the jungian archtypical trickster he represents our fear of the unknown and the unpredictability of the Universe. But in The Dark Knight, Batman defeats the Joker by not giving in to fear. He doesn't even kill the Joker. He uses the cell phone sonar invention only once as a means to defeat the Joker but knew it crossed a line and built in its own destruction and limited the powers use to one time. He doesnt give in to the seduction of ultimate power. The Batman is a true hero. 

Harvey Dent represents how crime can be fought without the Dark Knight. But threats to rachel make him consider violating his values. And when rachel is killed and he himself becomes a victim he proves to be corruptible. He chooses to exact revenge as a vigilante. As Two Face he justifies his murders as fate by flipping a coin. He does not pass judgement. Judgement is left to the fate of the coin flip. Only he is choosing who is judged. This is just another corrupting of justice. An extreme that in the story serves to prove the validity and necessity of Batman. 

The conclusion of The Dark Knight establishes that Batman is a moral alternative. It argues that the exemplar morality is to defeat injustice by getting your hands dirty. That a true solution to defending the state is being believed to be a villain but making the hard choices that are in the state's best interest. So The Dark Knight finishes as a film by adding to the moral conclusions of Batman Begins. 


The Dark Knight Rises from taking the fall. 

The Dark Knight Rises continues 8 years after The Dark Knight. In the third film, Batman has fallen from grace by taking the fall for Harvey Dent. The films primary villain is Bane. He has all of Batman's training as being a part of the League of Shadows. Just like Batman, he rejects the league of shadows for his own belief in something better. The film builds up Bane as the perfect adversary to Batman but then undoes him with the twist. After the twist, Bane is just a thug acting out of love. He doesn't represent an ideological opposite for Batman to defeat on his journey to realizing what it takes to be the truest hero. Instead Bane is just a thug. The true enemy turns out to be Talia Al Ghul who ends up being a reiteration of Ra's Al Ghul. Nolan seems more concerned with sewing up the themes of his films as a trilogy than continuing the moral debate his first two films established. 

What I would have preferred from the Dark Knight Rises, would have been for Bane to represent the opposite end of the ideological pendalum from the Joker. Where the Joker is Anarchy and Fear, Bane could have embodied The Dark Knight taken to a further extreme, he could have been the incarnation of power and strength gone wrong. He could have reacted to the realization that civil society is imperfect by imposing the ultimate power of fascism. He could have been the revolutionary turned dictator/tyrant. He could have been what would happen if someone with Batman's training and intelligence decided he was the only one deserving of ultimate power. That the failings of the state could be fixed by the empowered individual. He could have represented the ideological opposite of The Dark Knight and the opposite origin that the film established. He could have represented how being born from hell versus privelage could lead to an extreme view in the opposite direction. But no. Instead he was just a pawn and simply the muscle belonging to Talia Al Ghul's head. He acts out of some unexplored loyalty and love. Talia Al Ghul is the real villain. However, her philosophical vantage point seemed unclear to me. She criticized Batman's failure as being unable to follow through and being unable to fully trust the people. Yet her solution to the problem was to destroy all of society including herself. I didn't understand how blowing up gotham with a fusion reactor proved or solved anything. Even Ra's Al Ghul's plan in Batman Begins seemed to have more thought. If society destroys itself by fear then there is a starting point to rebuild. A clean slate. But destroying it completely with a bomb is just an apocalypse. It says that society is undeserving let's just destroy it. Where the first two films established mythological stories as premises to ideological debate, The Dark Knight Rises doesn't. It doesn't have much to say about morality. Or if it does, it's just not as strong and clear as the first two films. The focus of the third film seemed to be about building a new franchise with Joseph Gordon Levitt's character and finishing the themes of fear. Yet Bruce Wayne's leap of faith in the prison does not seem to finish the philosophical progression established by The Dark Knight. It is a step backwards. Yes he thematically proves himself by rising from ashes. It serves the film well but it doesn't serve the mythological arguments of the Trilogy as a whole. Yes, he sewed the thread of "Why do we fall, so we can learn to get back up" together but more important than minor themes like getting back up is the overall moral and mythological assertions about what a hero should or shouldn't do. A proper continuation would have provided an alternative to the Hero "taking the fall". I mean, he "rises" from "taking the fall" as a play on words, but I mean "taking the fall" as in he accepts condemnation from society. It could have been a logical progression of the moral argument by saying that a hero should openly stand in the face of injustice instead of hiding in the shadows. Taking the fall for Harvey Dent wasn't the best way to be a Hero and that in this third film he grows and learns there is a better way to be a Hero. A proper mythology should be about what the hero learns from his journey. The Dark Knight Rises doesn't seem to do this. Or if it does, then it is saying the hero learns that he wants to have a normal life. But not because there shouldn't be vigilante justice, since he decided to just pass the torch. It says be a Hero for as long as you can until your family butler chews you out for risking your life and family name. What?  

This third film builds up Bane to be the perfect adversary for Batman. But then it throws a twist in the mix. Only the twist undoes the villain Bane. He isn't the child born in Hell who ascended into the light. He wasn't trained by the league of Shadows. He wasn't the son heir of Ra's Al Ghul come to finish the destruction of Gotham. He was just a body guard of Talia. Just the muscle man. A devoted servant. We spent the whole movie wondering how Batman would rise to defeat the Dark Knight equivalent of James Bond's "Jaws" or "Odd Job". He was a lacky with flare. All the things we cared about Bane now mean nothing. Worst of all, the story doesn't seem to replace Bane with an equally substantial moral adversary. Even though Talia was pulling the strings the whole time and this was interesting for the plot, Talia Al Ghul is not fully formed as an opposition to Batman. Characters often exist as opposing ideologies that help support the idea that the protagonists actions or view points are better. That's how a story makes a point. In this case, Talia doesn't strengthen the moral position of Batman. She is merely exacting revenge for her father's failures. So she represents the idea that one should seek revenge. This doesn't seem to be nearly as strong as The Joker's need to inflict chaos and fear. The third film falls short. 


So as a trilogy the Moral Argument goes:
Batman Begins is about taking it upon yourself to fight injustice by conquering your fears.
The Dark Knight says battling fear and protecting justice requires getting your hands dirty even if it means being condemned by society. 
The Dark Knight Rises says rise to the occasion but live your life and let someone else get their hands dirty, and remember we said a bunch of stuff about fear and revenge and an underground society of anti-utopians, well their back but they don't actually represent anything you should just be afraid of them or not really them, just the daughter of that guy cuz she wants revenge."

It could have said, "Rise against fear but don't become something for society to fear". Or anything else for that matter. 

It's really hard to criticize someone as brilliant as Nolan whom I personally admire, but I think I'm making a pretty valid case here. But that's what happens when the studio forces you to make a sequel and turn it into a continuing franchise because it's too valuable of a property and they make you do it on a quick timeline. 

On a personal note, I loved the film. The Cat Woman was hands down the best iteration of the character. She provides valuable anti-hero alternative. She commits crime as theft out of necessity and establishes that the natural scarcity of society may necessitate the violation of laws and the violation of societies rules is not inherently evil. Not to mention, her character is attractive as hell and provides a good reason for Bruce Wayne to give a shit about the world again.

In the end, The Dark Knight rises is a spectacular film. Personally I enjoyed it a lot. It is one of the best movies of the summer and it is a shame to critique it and be disappointed. Yet given the moral complexity of the first two films and the strides that they accomplish, the third film film fails to add to the morality of the mythology. Instead, it is an entertaining film in the way that other films are entertaining. I often hate that directors are subject to so much scrutiny, but in this case Nolan has fallen just short of perfection and missing that mark is all the difference. Where he could have completed the moral argument of the mythology he created, he merely continued the franchise because the studio felt this is too valuable a property. I still am not sure what Talia Al Ghul was all about. In my personal opinion, if you take her out of the third film or leave her as a false ally and fourth position on the moral structure then the film could have worked. But instead, she is the main villain and her belief that society needs to be punished for decadence with complete destruction does not seem to be a valuable alternative to vigilanteism. In the end, the film seems to argue that while injustice needs to be fought, the cost takes its toll and an individual is best living their life and pursuing happiness then sacrificing them self to the demands of the State's defense. This is because Bruce Wayne ends up leaving his life as Batman and the protector of Justice behind. Where the The Dark Knight argued that the Hero's duty was to bare the burden of his responsibility to the state, The Dark Knight Rises suggests that the Hero should try to live a normal life. In the end, The Dark Knight trilogy completes the story to a satisfying conclusion but fails to provide a complete ideological argument about the hero's role in civil society. 

I loved the Dark Knight Rises, but instead of getting the Hero we deserved from the Dark Knight, we got the end of a trilogy. Nolan did do a great job of completing the story. And for anybody else but Nolan this would be satisfactory. Yet because the Dark Knight as a second film was so good and made such a clear and coherent contribution to modern mythology, the Dark Knight Rises but not high enough. 

Da nana na na na na na BATMAN,

-MM

Collating the Collective Consciousness: Social Transparency, Data Farming, National Security and The End of Privacy

Today io9.com posted an article about a canadian University professor by the name of Steve Mann who was assaulted in a McDonalds in France for wearing a computer device similar to the upcoming google glass. http://io9.com/5926587/what-may-be-the-worlds-first-cybernetic-hate-crime-unfolds-in-french-mcdonalds

They tried to remove the device from his head and according to Mann, "The eyeglass is permanently attached and does not come off my skull without special tools." This event marks what the article refers to as possibly "the world's first cybernetic hate crime". 


I thought about this and wondered, why was he assaulted in the first place and concluded that the french McDonalds employees were probably uncomfortable with being recorded. They were either upholding what they thought to be their duty to prevent competitive research as far as photographing their restaurant and menu (some businesses do not allow inside photography), or they were personally concerned about having their photographs taken. Steve Mann was able to take photographs of the assailants in the encounter despite them breaking his device because that is what it does. Yet doesn't that in some way prove the point of their concerns? 


A technologically augmented person is capable of recording everything around them. The lack of precedence has left the future of such possibilities in their litigious infancy and is currently a matter for the internet voices of discourse and descent. Steve Mann carry's a note from his doctor and wears the device as part of his research as a University professor. Are these justifications any different than a person simply wearing google glass? Do private citizens in public have the right not to be recorded? Is every place of business then a sanctuary of privacy where recording devices should not be allowed? What is the point then of using devices like this in public? Will it be like smoking cigarettes and electronic devices will only be allowed in designated areas? These questions are only the beginning. They are the proverbial tip of the iceberg in a titanic set of issues to come.  


The post-information revolution is marked by countless threats to our privacy from social networking, to data farming, TSA airport scanners, GPS cellular geotagging,  online web traffic cookies and whatever else can be surmised from the digital crumbs we leave laying around. I'm going to briefly discuss a few things that are less common knowledge as a means to broaden the debate because like the music industry's fight against digitized music, the battle for our privacy is practically already over. We are on a path of evolution towards existing as a collective consciousness where social transparency has replaced privacy.

We voluntarily forfeit most of our privacy through our social networking. We do so because the benefits outweigh the cost and only broadcasting to our friends and followers seems to be an acceptable amount of privacy. As long as my boss can't see it, who cares? Well, in actuality all of our traffic exists on servers in the cloud of information and we are establishing a permanent record of everything we ever do? If you thought figuring out the history of Julius Cesar from pottery artwork and the forensic science of CSI was impressive, just wait until your grand children's grand children go through your instagram photos. Not only that but every time you're logged into your gmail, words that you type and even searches and sites you visit are all logged. If you don't believe me, try typing boobs twice in a row in your search bar. Every time you tweet whether it originated from your foursquare app or not, you have just geotagged your account with your location data. Even if you don't tweet it, the cellular network server logs will still have location information from every time your phone triangulated its position and selected which towers to connect to. We forfeit this information because its collection is not meant to be personal. The data is collected for the optimization of the service that is provided. Whether its for your own good or whether the data that is farmed is sold by spotify, facebook or google to advertisers, it will soon cease to be unpersonal.

As our ability to process prediction information evolves into more quantum based visualization of potential realities, we will start tracking personal data. We won't only care if you typed canon into your search bar so that Amazon can recommend which camera deal you should look at. We're going to start caring who you are and how you behave. We're going to start caring about who you interact with and what kind of influence you have on other people. The data farming itself is far more valuable then the camera you were going to purchase. People just don't see it yet because they can't even imagine what these kind of tools will look like. Let me be the first to explain that we will eventually model your mind from the data traffic. Every tweet you ever post, will provide a collective context by which to profile and model everything from your social values, psychological states, and statistical information about your reactions. Basically what I imagine is a way of modeling a person as a quantum super position in psychological space. We would visualize each person as a quantum graph of possible behaviors. There's no point in privacy because we would know what you're going to do before you would even do it.

Not only that, but what happens when every car, every person, and every public space is packed with devices that record information about what's going on in the world. When cars start driving themselves they will be mounted with recording technology. Every person with a pair of google glasses will be recording information. And in the name of national security, all of the devices will be accessible to the necessary agencies. Not only that, but I read an article the other day about a device for airport security that sounded like a laser spectrometer that was capable of measuring whether or not you had even a few molecules of cocaine stuck to a dollar bill in your wallet or your adrenalin was rising. A spectrometer determines the molecules and elements in a substance through calculation like figuring out atomic weight. Only a laser spectrometer would gather this information from measuring the change in the speeds of light as they are absorbed and reflected by your body and clothing. Despite how it works, what it means is you could mount them all over the city. You could even attach them to your google glasses and look at a person and it could tell you whether their oxytocin levels were rising so that you knew if they were attracted to you.

Imagine a world where a person is sitting in a coffee shop. A guy looks over at a girl and instantly messages her a greeting instead of walking up and physically talking to her. The girl receives the message and she looks over at the man and starts going through all his information. Certain types of things require granting access. The guy can see that she is looking and starts granting her access requests to things like his instagram and facebook accounts. She starts going through his tweets and starts building personality models based on the words he uses. The guy can see that her oxytocin levels are rising, her adrenalin levels are minimal, and knows that she has not found anything surprising. The girl is currently dating a different guy, and he decides to check in on her. He messages her and starts viewing her activity. Some of it is currently cloaked or hidden,  so he starts running simulations that factor in the time intervals of her invisible traffic and the possibilities based on her geo-location and time of day. He can tell that she is meeting someone because the amount of process power that she is using, so he asks her who she is talking to. She could try to lie to him, but there isn't really a point because he would eventually be able to tell, so instead she starts sharing her vision. She shows him the guy she met and all his collected data. She asks if this upsets him. He replies you tell me if I should be concerned. He starts running simulations to see if he should be concerned and starts tweeting it and asks for an opinion poll on whether he should be concerned. friends of his and random followers start chiming in their votes and comments based on the information at hand.

This is a world without privacy and a world where we live in a collective conciousness. Currently it is science fiction, but the technology exists to make it become science fact. It's not too far away, it's right around the corner and barely different from the way things exist right now. The question that I'm asking is, if you think about it. Really think about it. Are you gonna throw that world out of your McDonalds? Or are you mad that the people who don't yet have the technology are discriminating against your right to be public?


Beep boop beep beep, robots n stuff,

-MM

Branding: Demystifying Product Perception

A Friend asked about what indie band to have at a company event. I responded with, 

"You need to put together a mathematical 'function' that factors booking price with optimal demographic target saturation to maximize your media impressions leverage. If you can identify your target then you can probably purchase the info from spotify. Who does the larger volume of your target demo listen to with the greatest frequency that asks for the lowest booking price? Factor in your branding model and what band fits your brand strategies best... bla bla bla bla."

And I realized how little people know about branding. The first common misconception about branding is that the brand itself is the company or the product, The Brand is better thought of as the consumer's psychological perception of said company or product. Branding is thusly the active process of changing perception. 

The first few times i heard people use the word brand i was mystified. The words usage was so strange in the way that it referred to large abstractions that didnt seem to fit the word completely in the way it seemed to imply. Thats part of the problem. When people refer to coke or pepsi as a brand we acquire a mental definition of the word in the way children acquire semantic rules and sentence structure. A mother points to a dog and says 'doggie' and the child imitates the word with a new association. And then the child points to a squirrel and says 'doggie'. This is how we come to think of brands as companies or products. Nobody's there to correct us when we miss use the word. Business people and ad gurus benefit from the words mystification by wielding it magnanimously. Nobody bothers to ask what is meant by re-branding or brand recognition, brand stratification, brand development, or brand loyalty. Nobody admits the initial confusion of referring to a music artist or celebrity as a premium brand. However the magical properties of the word lie in distracting from the obvious illusion. The brand was never in the salesman's hand you always imagined it to be there. It was in your head the whole time and never physically existed at all. Re-branding never alters the product, it only changes the existing impression you have of the product and seeks to change it to something else.

In this light, the word branding loses its awe. Branding becomes the act of manipulating perception of a product. It is just a reputation.  Branding never starts with the logo or the media buy or the band that will play at the event. Because the key component missing from that logic is thinking about the minds that will process the imagery of the logo, that will interact with the given media, and will experience the band at the event. People think you're doing something to the product, but you're not altering the product itself in any way. You are just altering the conversation about the product.
Thusly, if you're planning to start altering perceptions then you first need to talk about demographics. 

A demographic is basically a localized cross section of a group of people. Think of the brand strategy as a virus. The strategy is to infect a group of people so that they take a specific action that is ultimately the consumption of your product. What age are they? What is their income level? What are they like as an identifiable culture or group of cultures? Identifying the demographic is key because you need to accurately determine their values.

Take any sociology class or crash course yourself with a quick google session and you will come to understand that culturally identifiable groups of people prioritize aspects of the world into a system of value. Knowing that your demographic is male, 30's, and success driven, might tell you that they value money. You might develop the strategy of infecting them with the idea that your product will help them get rich. The virus cannot attach itself unless properly shaped to fit the mind of your targets.  Ultimately it is about communicating that the product is valuable to the consumer. The product may not actually be valuable to the consumer but that doesn't matter if the brand is. 

Brand strategy starts with brand recognition and brand saturation with the intent of fostering brand stratification in hopes of establishing brand loyalty. These abstractions are less mystic when you recognize the interchangeability of product perception with brand. People just seem to think of the word brand as being something more, because it has really good branding. 

Just did it,

-MM

Road Rage is Rationalized Sadism

In LA people are pretty rude behind the wheel. Traffic is condensed, aggrevating, and there aren't really any consequences for being a total dick. You're insulated by the comfort of your air conditioned steel box of personal comfort. That's why people are so rude while driving as opposed to when they're in line at the bank. They're in the safety of their car and theres nothing you can do or say to them. So people don't care. Driving in LA is like being at a crowded concert full of inconsiderate assholes. They jab you with elbows, cut in line, and push you out of the way at the last minute when you patiently saved a seat for you and your friends close to the front.

So the other morning I was driving to work. If you've ever lived in central LA and tried to merge on to Fountain ave during the morning rush, than you know windows are short. A 2000 Mercedes C class was coming fast, but missing the window could mean being stuck for 10 more minutes so I went for it. The cars ahead on fairfax were stopped at the light so its not like I was slowing the white Mercedes down. Still, as soon as the cars start to go, the white mercedes revs his engine and passes me at full speed only to swerve in front of me and slam on his breaks, forcing me to slam mine to avoid collision. The force of the seat belt pressing against my chest as the momentum of my body refused to arrest its motion was a physical manifestation of the dude in the white mercedes' anger. It was as though he stepped in front of me in line at the bank and pushed me in the chest, suggesting I step back. I pulled up next to him at the next light, shaking my head, mouthing the words "What the fuck?!?!". He rolled down his window and through his fake dolce sun glasses said, "You cut me off, that's why I did that."

It was an odd justification. Pperhaps I'm oblivious to the fact that I'm a shitty driver, but regardless of whether I cut him off, I don't understand how any sort of road-enraging mistake warrants that kind of retaliation. I wanted to throw the yogurt I was eating out my window and into his car. Yet, I would have only perpetuated the societal flaw. Being displeased with other people isn't a good reason to be a dick. For that matter when is violence or malice ever justified? There is a difference between revenge and justice. One is finding personal satisfaction from paying back the infliction of pain or suffering by maliciously returning pain or suffering. The other is the assurance that societal stability is preserved by consequences. I'm not saying you should be a pacifist and I'm not saying our country's defense program isn't crucial. I'm just saying that in the case of personal conflict, lashing out with malicious intent only makes society worse. Road rage makes the world a worse place and so does being a dick because someone cut in your coffee line.

The world has limited resources and a limited amount of space, so arresting each other's motion is inevitable. The world is more tolerable if you just act consciously about the space you take up and who you're taking it from. I'm not saying turn the other cheek because that would only make your struggle worse, but I'm saying that throwing your yogurt into the road raging dick in the mercedes' car doesn't get you anything back. Justified revenge is not the same as justice. Keying someone's car in a parking lot because they stole your space is taking pleasure in getting someone back. It is pleasure in the suffering of others which makes it sadistic.


Honk,

-MM

Social Flocking, Trend-Leadership Capacity, Hyper-Dimensional data models and Advertising

Back in 2009, I read an article that compared the price of Kim Kardashian's tweet with the purchase price of commercial airtime, and banner ad placement. What struck me as being so interesting was the fact that Kim Kardashian was being paid $10,000 per tweet for Carl's Jr. While most articles focused on this astounding price point, I was instantly more interested in the fact that the channel method of ad delivery was twitter. As an advertising medium, twitter is unique because it is(was at the time) assumed to be personal. On the surface connecting the dots between the number of followers a celebrity like Kim Kardashian has and the value of the media impressions targeting her fan base is both easy to understand and a good idea. Below that surface is the value of the individual and the complexity of the metrics that make that valuation possible. As I thought more about this, I realized that the future of advertising will predictably lead to in depth micro-analysis of market behavior and will also lead to unpredictable changes to our society. Here I will informally explore my developing theories about how this will be done and what may result.

For me, the most interesting thing about Kim Kardashian's tweet price is not the value placed on her tweets, nor the number of followers she has, but that she is valuable because of an assumption about her leadership. As we start to value the numbers of followers a celebrity has, we will start to value the details that tracking public data from social networks like twitter possess. This data is potentially more valuable than the media impressions garnered from one tweet. For instance I heard a story that Jay Z had set London as a stop on his tour and approached Spotify for information about his tour locations and based on the geo-data provided by Spotify users, they were able to inform Jay Z that his fan base was stronger in Manchester. He changed his tour and the stop sold out. This is one specific example about the value of social network data farming. Currently most of the data that we farm or at least use for leverage in an article is crude. We name the number of youtube video plays, retweets, hashtags and likes when citing the popularity of a given media subject.  What I propose is that explaining social behavior from youtube video hits is like trying to explain our society based on the amount of morning commute traffic on a given freeway. While the ways that we collect data are becoming pretty sophisticated, the ways that we analyze the social aspects of these metrics is in it's infancy.

The first term I coined is called Social Flocking. I chose this terminology because a part of predicting mass behavioral trends is observing how a collective behaves. In the way that a flock of birds or a school of fish organically shifts it's trajectories, a sub-culture, demographic, or network will flock towards or away from behavioral trends. Where trending refers to the increasing popularity of a behavior, social flocking would refer to the cohesiveness of given collectives of people. Where we might observe that the use of the "Draw Something" app is trending, an understanding of social flocking might tell us that users over 50 or app users that listen to Justin Bieber and tweet about the show Glee usually indicate that the Trend is on it's way out. Observing not just the number of hits but predicting the changes in the trends social gravity are far more valuable.

Which lead's me to another important aspect of mass-behavioral observation. Specific sub-cultural demographics or even individuals are leaders while others are followers. We will eventually care whether or not users are early on a trend or late on a trend and the frequency with which they lead a trend. We will care because we not only want to know how many people a tweet from Kim Kardashian reaches but we will want to know which people react by following the behavior and which people do not. Perhaps Justin Bieber's "Trend-Leadership Capacity" is greater than Kim Kardashian's so advertisers should value his tweets more because they ensure more leverage on top of the volume of media impressions. This is where things start to get complicated. Measuring an individual or flock's trend-leadership would require really difficult and vast amounts of information to process.

I don't have specifics yet, seeing as how I am calling attention to the problem more than suggesting solutions, but my initial proposal is that we start charting the metrics on social flock cohesiveness and trend-leadership utilizing hyper-dimensional data models. First of all, any hope of making sense of micro-scale mass cultural behavior models will require new ways of comparative analysis. x,y line charts, pie charts, and bar graphs will not cut it. This is because one would need to observe too broad a scope of behavioral statistics. Connecting the fact that a trending joke like "That Shit Cray" over twitter to the value of purchasing a specific celebrity as the spokesperson for a shoe would require cataloguing bar charts and statistical data on all tweets as well as demographics and history of shoe purchases. This is pretty much the current standard model. But knowing that a sub-culture of Americans under 25 buy nike basketball shoes and that there is a connection between individuals who have tweeted "Cray" so that the Shoe company can specifically target tweeters that followed the "Cray" trend early on by tweeting the word with in the first month of the trend is a suggestion for the future. Recognizing these more specific demographic targets with specific target outcomes will both save money and reduce collateral damage so to speak in the way that laser guided tomahawk missiles are an advanced technology that surpasses and makes firing scud missiles obsolete. I think hyper-dimensional data models will allow the ability to simultaneously compare large amounts of data. We'll probably have to start using terms traditionally used for explaining quantum physics such as gravity, magnetism, super position, or quanta to explain the complex evolution of trends and other types of abstract data. Between the development of augmented reality and touch-tablet technologies we will be able to sift through hyper-dimensional data models in ways that we were never able to do in the past. Otherwise the suggestions about targeting specific demo's based on the language they tweet or the music they play on spotify would be just as much a matter of science fiction as manipulating a hypersphere representation of social flock cohesivity metrics with your hands using augmented reality glasses.

Now what happens when we start analyzing the value of social flocks and individuals as having higher trend-leadership capacity for a given product or brand? Advertisers will undergo a shift from buying demographics to buying trends. Advertisers will not only care about individuals like Kim Kardashian but they will care about all individuals. The first thing I started to wonder about this phenomenon was whether or not we will start to become our own individual forms of currency. Company's will give coupon discounts to person A because person A is a trend setter for person B and person C. While this thought is pretty gigantic I think it goes even farther by effecting our individual relationships. What if society knew that our values went up based on who's posts we liked and who's tweets we retweet. Our lives are already changing for the worse because they have become public but on top of our relatioships and behaviors becoming public they become a matter of business. What happens when people become friends with other people because of the number of followers they have and we talk to each other because of how much attention it potentially gets us? Oh wait, we already do? It happens for celebrities and bloggers and public figures now. It's only a matter of time before it is the way of life for everyone.

#nowtrending

-MM




**UPDATE**
I found this video on Text Mining. So since I read the Kim Kardashian article, companies have popped up that analyze text information. My suggestions about what we can determine is way ahead of this. Text Mining is only one part of behavioral trend prediction.

Anti Gravity and flying cars

I was in highschool and after reading Hawking's book entitled a brief history of time where he talked about String Theory, I spent a lot of time thinking about what string theory actually meant. The short layman explanation of what I imagine is that all particles are best thought of as fluctuating hyper-spheres. If that's not layman enough for you, a fluctuating sphere would look like a sphere of water floating in Zero gravity. A hyper-sphere is a sphere extruded into more dimensions than the typical 3 that we imagine. If you're having trouble with this, then you're probably not going to follow the rest of this so I'm just going to assume that what I'm saying makes sense.

If all particles are fluctuating hyper-spheres of energy then they might effect eachother in the way that moving ripples of water do. This lead me to a thought. What if these fluctuations emit a kind of wave. This is an easy assumption because objects that vibrate typically emit sound, heat, or light depending on the degree that they disturb everything around them. Yet if everything is energy as string theory proposes its hard for me not to imagine that as particles fluctuate they will not cause a disturbance that effects the others around it. Take 2 particles and while they're individual mass and energy have not changed, together the vibration of their fluctuations might have a greater amplitude. This vibration or wave emission we're going to call a gravity field. Try to imagine a sign wave and that the sign wave is travelling. Better yet think about holding your vacuum cleaner chord and whipping it up so that the wave travels down the chord and bounces back to you. Now better yet, think about shaking your bedroom blanket so that one ripple travels along it. This is like the gravity field wave that is emitted by all particles. Only these waves aren't travelling away from the object, they are travelling towards the object. This is probably because particles exist in more dimensions than the observable 3. They are like wadded up crumples of paper if that paper was 3D space and every time those ripples of gravity intersect they cause each other friction which slows them down. It would be like a ripple of water having slight bounce back disturbances from hitting another, but because these ripples are in more dimensions then 3 and probably kind of overlap themselves in a hyper dimensional space, they might be bouncing back and forth inside of their own folds.

Now go back to the sign wave and picture two of them interacting with each other, but instead of merging and dividing their values they are solid and the peaks and valleys grip one another like teeth on a zipper. This is why the more mass an object has, the more gravity it has. Every particle emits a gravity field but we do not observe the effects until the collective amplitude is great enough. In zero G's we are more able to see droplets of water attracted to each other. This is because we are not distracted by the intensity of earth's gravity. Particles are attracted to eachother because the gravity field waves are gripping each other kinda like two Tank treads driving towards eachother. Only instead of a two dimensional sign wave you have an nDimensional spherical wave pulsing out like radio waves from an antennae or the waves coming out of your cell phone. I do not know anything specific about these waves and why we can't observe them and only their effect, but one theory that I had was that dark matter isn't actually matter at all but rather a mathematical biproduct of the way nDimensional space is folded in on itself because we think of the universe as the x,y,z 3 dimensional physical space. Regardless of whether my theory on dark matter is interesting or useful, I propose that a way to vibrate energy so that the gravity field frequency would interact with the natural gravity field like a tank driving up an escalator. What seems silly about this idea is that you couldn't really cause propulsion by firing a radio wave into another radio wave so why would you think gravity field waves would be different. I think they are because they cause objects to move, interact with each other, and overall seem to manipulate observable space itself. If the gravity field of a planet will interact with the gravity field of a meteor why can't you manipulate a gravity field to be in a specific flux with that field. I imagine a way of spinning particles or energy to create these gravity field fluctuations. It would be like spinning a weighted ball inside of a larger sphere. In fact the vibrations in your phone are caused by putting a small weight at the end of a pendulum attached to a motor. When the motor spins, the angular momentum of that weight causes your phone to vibrate because the phone is being moved by the momentum of the tiny weight. I've seen toys that move across a table simply through vibration. 

The weight and frequency is such that the toy bounces up with the spinning weight and travels forward grips the table from the weight of the toy and then jumps up again. Only the jumps are too small to look like a jump at all. The toy just slides. This is the same when you see your cell phone sliding across a table when you put it on vibrate. What I'm envisioning is a way to spin energy so that the vibrations of the gravity field of the particles is out of the normal sync that all gravity fields have. It doesn't get easier than imagining a tank tread driving up a down escalator. What we need is a way to determine what kind of energy gravity fields emit and why we can't see them. I suspect that it has more to do with the folding of space than it has to do with releasing energy. Gravity field propulsion would only work while suspended inside a gravity field in the way that sailboats can only sail when there's wind, but I'm proposing a way to manipulate the gravity field flux so that our vehicles can fly like a cellphone sliding across a table.

I want a flying car,

 -MM

UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that gravity is not a form of energy at all. I now think it is the biproduct of folding space. Space is folded by the motion or fluctuation of energy fields with mass. As space folds in hyper dimensions the increase of dimensionality, increases the natural pull that energy fields exert on each other. This pull is some how caused by the way that fields interact and bend each other. Instead of thinking of gravity as the result of a field of gravitons being emitted as energy. Imagine the game where kids play with a parachute and they wave it up and down and a rubber ball travels along the parachute. Only the parachute is space folded in on itself.

Gravity then isn't a form of energy in the way that light is a form of energy. Gravity is more like the frequency and magnitude of ocean waves where space would be the water in the ocean. If you were looking down at an ocean and you saw a beach ball travelling across the ocean it might not be evident what was causing that motion. Viewed from the side, the beach ball is being pushed along by a wave. We see the water but aren't able to see that the water is moving.

Because space isn't like the surface of an ocean or a parachute, the waves or folds in space don't go up and down they appear to expand and contract. Picture an inch worm, inching it's way across a table. Now picture a bubble. The bubble is expanding and contracting. Now that bubble isn't a bubble it is a link in a chain of bubbles who's surfaces all touch each other. As the bubble contracts like the inch worms feet touching, the chain links are pulled closer together, only the back of the inchworm is the center of the bubble expanding into nDimensional space.

Cell Phone Glasses

One day I came up with the idea of hacking a Kinect Camera and mounting it to a pair of glasses. The 3D camera could read the hand gestures in front of your face. Combine that with the ability to superimpose information through augmented reality and you have yourself a 3D interface that appears to be floating in front of your face. Back, when I came up with this idea, I found these glasses and wanted to attach the kinect camera to them. http://www.vuzix.com/consumer/products_wrap920.html
An example of hacking a kinect to read your hand gestures to run the interface on your phone.

This is what it would look like if you could walk around and see augmented information.



Yes, I know that google and Apple are working on a pair of glasses, but I don't think they utilize the kinect camera for a way to interface. Google glasses video:

3D hologram projector using Intersecting Lasers

Back in 3rd grade in my G.A.T.E. class we were challenged to write our own books. I decided to make mine about time travel. I had always wondered how 3D hologram projectors like the ones in star wars would actually work. What I came up with was a way to intersect lasers. I was explaining this to a friend last night on the 4th of July and began wondering if someone had actually built it yet. I googled it today and found out some company built one: http://hackaday.com/2010/01/09/ces-3d-laser-projection-system/
 

Yep, I was in 3rd grade and I wrote a sci-fi book about time travel and invented a way to make holographic projectors that actually became a real invention. So because I've been coming up with concepts, ideas, and inventions that consistently come to fruition by other people, I decided to quit sitting on them and start publishing them on my blog. This is exactly what I was explaining to my friend last night.

How it works is that the luminance value of the point where two beams intersect would be brighter than their individual luminance.

Take a laser and have it draw a line. The beam would like a triangle-like surface as seen in a lazer light show. Take another laser and put it at a perpendicular position below the projected beam. Have it draw a circle. It would look like a cone of light. Where the two lasers intersect you would see a circle with a brighter luminance than the cone or the triangle.

Now if you were to take 3 lazers from positions resembling an equilateral triangle sitting on a floor pointing up. The lasers would draw any 3D object by drawing the outline of that object one vertical slice at a time. It would be similar to the way that a 3D printer prints a plastic 3D object by making one slice at a time.

Now when lasers draw complex shapes you start to see a refresh rate depending on the distance the laser has to travel. So, in order to reduce the refresh rate and to also reduce the amount of haze created by the stray beams of light, you would build an array of lasers in the shape of a ring pointing up. The lasers would be able to draw both from the top down and bottom up at the same time as well as you would have more than 3 lasers intersecting at a time so that their luminance could be less visible except for the intersection points that they are drawing. For example if you have a beam of a luminance of 50percent intersecting with another beam of 50percent you get a point of light with a luminance of 100percent lets say. Having an array of lasers means you could have 10 beams at a value of 10percent creating the same intersection point of light with a luminance of 100percent. What this does is it reduces the visibility of the stray laser beam light since the beams are only 10% instead of %50.

In the video, the prototype has a glass cylinder around it. I imagine they did this to stop the stray beams from flying all over the room because they could cause retina damage. Instead the beams are reflected by the cylinder so that they only go up instead of all over the room. Now have the beams alternate their colors as they draw and you have the ability to draw a color object. What I came up with last night was using this technology combined with the kinect camera's ability to record 3D data and map 2D video onto the 3D information. Put 2 kinect cameras at 180degree opposite positions or use an array of them and you have just created a 3D recording device. You would then be able to teleconference in 3D or record your 3D projection. Boom!

Let There Be (laser)Light!

 -MM


***Update***
I saw in a different video that the japanese company uses excited ions suspended in a gas.
Thats prob why they have the glass case.